A new technique turns climate-warming carbon emissions to stone. In a test program in Iceland, more than 95 percent of the carbon dioxide injected into basaltic lava rocks mineralized into solid rock within two years. This surprisingly fast transformation quarantined the CO2 from the atmosphere and could ultimately help offset society’s greenhouse gas emissions, scientists report in the June 10 Science.
“It’s working, it’s feasible and it’s fast enough to be a permanent solution for storing CO2 emissions,” says study coauthor Juerg Matter, a geochemist at the University of Southampton in England.